Share this

Read more!

Get our weekly email

Enter your email address

How will the independence referendum impact on all four of the UK's countries?/wikimedia

Last week the British media turned its
attention to the christening of the Royal Baby with the headlines
‘Gorgeous George’, continued its obsessions with who said what
and apologised for what in ‘Plebgate’, and allowed for an
occasional airing of the issue which rocked Scotland: the potential
closure of Grangemouth petrochemical plant.

Such coverage shows the growing
divergence between the London media and political world and the
concerns of Scotland, but a small part of the thoughtful English
media turned its attention to the implications from the Scottish
debate for the UK, in ways which tell us a lot about how Scotland is
changing and the nature of the UK.

Adam Price, a former Plaid Cymru MP,
wrote in ‘The Guardian’ about the collapsing state of Britain’s
national institutions and the trashing of public goods and services
by the Cameron government. He addressed accurately the increasingly
apocryphal language of the ‘Better Together’ camp which he
believes ‘carries with it the not so subtle subtext of a married
couple pondering the upheavals of divorce’.

Price directly challenged this
assumption, reminding pro-union opinion that in terms of the union
there are ‘four people in this marriage’. This means it isn’t
just about Scotland or Scotland and England, but the voices of Wales
and Northern Ireland. As we speak these entail four very distinct
futures, of which the most complicated and confused is the direction
of England, seemingly fixated at a political class level with Europe,
immigration and fuelling the concentration of power and wealth in the
London city region.

Then there was David Aaronvitch (£)
claiming that the rest of the UK needed to wake up to the scale of
change ongoing due to Scotland – with the greatest shift since the
Reform Act of 1832 on offer. However, Aaronvitch argued that ‘three
elections have been altered by the Scottish vote since 1955’.

This is just inaccurate. On any
criterion, only the 1964 and February 1974 elections saw England
tipped over into the Labour camp when it more marginally returned
more Tory MPs. That’s a total of two elections which were
knife-edge contests (2010’s inclusive result seeing England
affected by not just the Scots but Welsh and Northern Irish).
Scotland has seen seven elections since 1959 in which Scots voters
were over-turned, including six of the last nine. Scotland has
endured 30 years of governments it didn’t vote for in the last 54
years; England just over two years.

But this is the wrong way to look at
things remembering Price’s four partners. Aaronvitch ignores the
impact of Wales and Northern Ireland. Take Churchill’s return to
office in 1951; an election which threw out the Attlee Government
even though Labour won more votes. Churchill’s UK majority of 17
was entirely made up of Ulster Unionist support who, if they had been
on opposition benches, would have produced a hung Parliament.

If Northern Irish politics had been the
same in 1974 as 1951, British politics could have been very
different. The election produced an inclusive result: Labour 301,
Tories 297, leading to a minority Labour administration. If the
Ulster Unionists had still taken the Tory whip as they did to 1972,
the Tories would have been seven seats ahead of Labour, and Heath’s
post-election offer of a deal with the Liberals more possible. And if
Heath had stayed in office, there would have been no Thatcher as Tory
leader and no Thatcherism.

There are some signs of political aware
liberal England following the Scots debate. Martin Kettle in ‘The
Guardian’ was a small watershed, picking up and understanding some
of the nuance of the Scottish debate. He recognised that much of
Scotland’s pro-self-government movement is more motivated by what
kind of society people want to live in, than constitutional
arrangements.

Kettle referenced the Jimmy Reid
Foundation Common Weal project and the growing independence
aspirations to shift Scotland into being a more Nordic social
democratic country. He didn’t dismiss or scoff at these, understood
the deep political emotions they tapped into, and that they
illustrated the chasm at the heart of British politics.

There are numerous questions that can
be thrown up to these initiatives: the Common Weal is a bit like a
pick ‘n’ mix 1970s left shopping list which it is difficult to
imagine the SNP or Labour fully adopting. Then there is the
inconvenient fact that Scotland cannot be fully Nordic because of at
least two fundamentals: geography and history. And finally there is
the issue of how social democratic Scotland’s political culture
really is.

Yet with all this and the retreat of
the centre-left across Europe, Kettle notes rightly ‘there is
something distinctly Scottish about it’, even in its drawing from
European examples.

Something is moving in parts of England
and Wales (and Northern Ireland too), being motivated, interested and
challenged by Scottish developments. Some of this is healthy, but it
would be good if some of the more blinkered pro-union opinion could
recognise a bit of this bigger picture.

How important reflective voices such as
Kettle and Aaronvitch will be in the next year is anyone’s guess.
How will they fare against the loud, certain, reactionary voices of
the likes of Simon Heffer trying to wave Scotland good riddance?

Then there are the confused voices of
liberal England such as ‘The Observer’s’ Catherine Bennett. A
few weeks ago she wrote a bizarre piece about Scotland claiming it
was a land obsessed with Bannockburn and the past. Bennett even wrote
that it was hard to imagine the UK fixating in this way, oblivious to
the continual war celebrations - next year of World War One.

We are in uncharted waters - that
confuses some old style unionists here and throws up some
unattractive belligerent nationalists. That’s hardly the
substantive point.

When Aaronvitch said this was as big as the
Reform Act of 1832 he was on the right lines, but with the wrong
example. Scottish independence would be an existential blow to UK
self-confidence. The only other comparisons are the loss of the
American colonies in 1783 and beginning of Irish independence in
1922. Britain really has still never fully got over either.

The Irish example is salutary. It took
from 1922 to 1949 for Ireland to become fully independent: 27 years.
Similarly it took Iceland 25 years from home rule to independence.
The same will probably be true for Scotland. The clock is as we speak
ticking on the present union. The question is whether the starting
gun is 1999 or 2014?

openDemocracy has worked for two years investigating the dark money driving Brexit. We have many more leads to chase down, but need your support to keep going. Please give what you can today – it makes a difference.

Related

This article is published under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence. If you have any
queries about republishing please
contact us.
Please check individual images for licensing details.